Dortmund will miss the services of midfielder mario Gotze, With the 20-year-old missing through injury, Marco Reus will be charged with the task of stopping Javi Martinez from dictating proceedings in the middle of the park
About a month before Borussia Dortmund beat Real Madrid in the semi-finals of the Champions League, their coach, Jurgen Klopp, was asked how his side had twice come out on top of games against Jose Mourinho’s team in the group stage. Easy, he replied: shut down Xabi Alonso and everything else follows.
He must have regretted being so open when Dortmund faced Madrid again, but the principle held true. Xabi Alonso is the player who sets Madrid’s rhythm: the majority of moves flow through him. So Mario Gotze harried him every time Madrid had possession and, when Dortmund got the ball, rapidly trotted off to overload on one flank or the other with Ilkay Gundogan advancing from deep in midfield to monitor Alonso.
Bayern Munich don’t play in quite the same way but their shape is similar to Madrid’s and they have a tendency to play through Javi Martinez. Logic, then, would suggest that if Gotze had been fit, he would have performed a similar role on Martinez to that he performed on his fellow Spaniard Alonso. With Gotze ruled out with a muscle injury, it seems most likely that Marco Reus will move into the centre with Kevin Grosskreutz taking his place on the left.
Gotze is also excellent at pulling wide from that central position to create triangles with the winger and full-back on the flank and that is something Reus must try to emulate, not just for the creative opportunities it offers but for what it may do in unsettling Bayern’s attacking full-backs, Philipp Lahm and David Alaba.
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